Rich People Buy Time
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How Smart Entrepreneurs Trade Money For Time
Broke people buy stuff. Rich people buy time.
Most entrepreneurs have this backwards.
They hustle 80 hours a week to build a business that was supposed to give them freedom, but end up working twice as hard as when they had a job. They make money just to blow it on material possessions that do nothing to break them free from the daily grind.
Meanwhile, successful founders have discovered a secret: time is the only non-renewable resource we have. Once it's gone, it's gone forever.
This isn't just about profit margins and revenue. It's about entrepreneurial mindset.
The greatest business builders aren't obsessed with fancy watches and expensive cars. They're obsessed with creating systems that give them back their time while their companies continue to grow.
You don't need to be running a unicorn startup to start thinking this way.
This mindset shift is the difference between burning out in your business or creating genuine freedom as an entrepreneur.
Let me show you how to make this transition.
The Hidden Cost of Cheap Decisions
You bought the $200 laptop instead of the $2,000 one.
Smart financial decision, right?
Not if that laptop crashes during client calls, freezes when you're trying to deliver work, and needs replacing every 18 months.
Not if it limits the software you can run, the speed you can work, and adds hours of frustration to your week.
The real cost isn't what you pay up front. It's what you pay in lost time, missed opportunities, and compounding frustration.
This happens everywhere in business:
Spending 3 hours figuring something out instead of paying someone $100 to do it right
Using free software that makes you do everything manually instead of investing in automation
Handling your own bookkeeping instead of hiring a professional
The problem is that we've been programmed to evaluate decisions based on money spent rather than time saved.
But when you're building a business, time is infinitely more valuable.
Every hour spent on $15/hour tasks is an hour not spent on $1,000/hour strategic work.
Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, understood this principle from the beginning. Before she had millions, she invested in buying back her time rather than upgrading her lifestyle.
In the early days of Spanx, she spent $5,000 to patent her idea instead of doing it herself—money she didn't really have at the time. Rather than learning legal jargon and spending countless hours on paperwork, she invested in expertise that protected her billion-dollar idea.
Even when she became successful, she continued investing in time rather than status. She famously didn't quit her day job selling fax machines until she absolutely had to, and ran Spanx without outside investors for its first 16 years—sacrificing faster growth for the time freedom to build the company her way.
The Four-Stage Time Wealth Progression
There's a progression I've observed among entrepreneurs who successfully make this shift from money-focused to time-focused thinking.
Stage 1: Trading Time For Money
This is where most people start.
You have a skill. You perform that skill. Someone pays you for it.
A designer creates logos for clients. A writer produces articles for businesses. A developer builds websites for local companies.
The math is simple: 1 hour worked = X dollars earned.
The ceiling is obvious: There are only 24 hours in a day.
Most freelancers and service providers get stuck here. They make a decent living but never break free from the time-for-money trap.
They try to increase their hourly rate, but that only goes so far. They end up working 60+ hours a week just to keep up with demand.
This isn't freedom. This isn't wealth. This is just a job you created for yourself.
Stage 2: Leveraging Systems To Multiply Time
The journey to time wealth begins when you realize that you need to separate your time from your income.
You start building systems that can work without your direct involvement:
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) that allow you to delegate easily
Templates that reduce repetitive work
Automations that handle routine tasks
Processes that maintain quality without your constant supervision
Systems are how you buy back your time.
Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, didn't become successful by personally managing properties. He built a system that connects property owners with travelers – a system that scales without his direct time investment.
The platform they built now processes millions of bookings daily without Chesky personally handling any of them. That's the power of a system.
You might start small:
Creating email templates instead of writing each message from scratch
Building a client onboarding process that runs automatically
Setting up standardized workflows for delivering your service
Each system you build buys back a little more of your time.
Stage 3: The Ecosystem Approach
Once you understand systems, you can start building an ecosystem – multiple systems that work together.
This is where true scale happens.
Your marketing system feeds your sales system, which feeds your fulfillment system, which feeds your referral system, which feeds back into your marketing system.
Each component strengthens the others.
Take Shopify founder Tobias Lütke. He didn't just build a single product. He created an ecosystem of interconnected tools and services that work together – payment processing, inventory management, marketing tools, app marketplace.
This ecosystem approach means Shopify can serve businesses from solo creators to enterprise brands without Lütke having to be personally involved in each relationship.
The key insight: When you build an ecosystem, you're not just buying back your own time – you're creating time wealth for your entire organization and your customers.
Stage 4: Time Wealth Mastery
The final stage is where you've built enough systems and passive income streams that your time is truly your own.
You work because you want to, not because you have to.
You spend your days on $10,000/hour activities – strategic thinking, relationship building, and pursuing opportunities that excite you.
Money decisions are evaluated primarily through the lens of time, not cost.
At this stage, you might:
Fly private not because you're showing off, but because saving 3 hours at the airport is worth the premium
Hire a personal chef not as a luxury, but because it saves you 10 hours a week of shopping, cooking and cleaning
Pay a premium for the best tools, team members, and services because you understand that quality saves time in the long run
I'm not suggesting everyone needs a private jet. But I am suggesting that once you value your time properly, many decisions that seem extravagant to others will seem logical to you.
How To Start Buying Time Today
You don't need to be rich to start buying time. You just need to shift your thinking.
Here are practical ways to begin:
1. Calculate your actual hourly worth
Not what you charge, but what your highest-value activities are worth to your business. This becomes your benchmark for deciding what to delegate.
If focusing on sales and strategy could generate $500/hour for your business, then any task worth less than that should eventually be delegated.
2. Identify your time drains
Track how you spend your working hours for one week. Be ruthlessly honest.
Where are the low-value activities consuming your schedule? Admin work? Social media? Email? Customer support? These are your first candidates for buying back time.
3. Create your first "time buying" budget
Start small. Allocate just 5-10% of your revenue specifically toward buying back your time. This isn't an expense – it's an investment with the highest ROI possible.
4. Master strategic outsourcing
You don't need full-time employees to start buying time. Begin with:
Virtual assistants for administrative tasks
Specialized freelancers for technical work
Subscription software that automates repetitive processes
For example, instead of spending hours scheduling social media posts manually, invest in a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite that lets you batch this work.
5. Build your first crucial systems
Start documenting your most common processes. Create simple checklists and templates. Record videos walking through tasks step-by-step.
These become the foundation for delegation and scaling.
The Time Wealth Mindset
The shift from buying stuff to buying time requires more than just tactics – it demands a fundamental mindset change.
Here's what this looks like:
Adopt a long-term perspective
Time-wealthy entrepreneurs think in decades, not quarters. They willingly make short-term sacrifices for long-term freedom.
When Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he famously operated at a loss for years. While Wall Street criticized him, Bezos maintained a long-term view. He wasn't focused on immediate profits but on building systems that would eventually dominate global commerce.
During Amazon's early years, Bezos told shareholders: "It's all about the long term." This patience allowed him to build infrastructure and systems that now generate billions while giving him the freedom to pursue other interests like Blue Origin.
Value effectiveness over efficiency
Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.
Time-wealthy entrepreneurs are ruthless about focusing on high-impact activities and eliminating or delegating everything else.
Embrace strategic laziness
The most successful entrepreneurs aren't the hardest working – they're the ones who find the simplest path to results.
Bill Gates famously said: "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
This isn't about avoiding work – it's about avoiding unnecessary work. The goal isn't to do more; it's to accomplish more by doing less.
The Hidden Tax of DIY Culture
There's a pervasive myth in entrepreneurship that you should do everything yourself, especially when starting out.
"Hustle harder." "Wear all the hats." "Bootstrap until it hurts."
This is misguided advice that keeps entrepreneurs trapped in Stage 1 of the time wealth progression.
Every task you insist on doing yourself when it could be delegated or automated is a self-imposed tax on your potential.
Here's what this tax really costs you:
Growth ceiling
When you're doing $20/hour tasks, you simply don't have the bandwidth to pursue $5,000/hour opportunities.
Innovation bandwidth
Creativity requires space. When you're bogged down in operations, you lose the mental freedom to innovate.
Health and relationships
The 80-hour hustle week doesn't just tax your business potential – it taxes your body, mind, and relationships.
Competitive disadvantage
While you're handling your own stuff (book keeping, coding, marketing, sales), your competitors are focusing all their energy on strategy, innovation, and growth.
From Time Poverty to Time Wealth
The journey from time poverty to time wealth isn't always linear, and it won't happen overnight.
But it begins with a critical mindset shift:
Stop treating time as a resource to be spent earning money. Start treating money as a resource to be invested in buying time.
This shift changes everything about how you build your business:
Instead of asking "How can I do this cheaper?" you ask "How can I remove myself from this process?"
Instead of saying "I can't afford help," you say "I can't afford not to get help with this."
Instead of thinking "I'll delegate when I'm making more money," you realize "I'll only make more money when I delegate."
The greatest entrepreneurs aren't working 80-hour weeks. They've built systems that multiply their impact while buying back their time.
They understand that true wealth isn't measured by what you can buy – it's measured by the freedom to spend your time exactly how you choose.
Start making this shift today. One system, one delegation, one automation at a time.
Your future self will thank you for the time you've bought them.
– Scott